Day 482 | Damperanie Creek: nice spot, hunh?
65 km | zzOz total: 15,412 km
An ominous sign when the wind dropped away last night, that gush of oxygen battering away has been my constant companion, as well as those couple of crows, since I left Mt Isa 10 days ago.
True to form it was back again as I tried rather futilely to roll the tent up neatly, problem was the wind was pointing vigorously back from whence I’ve come, I’m smashing into it once again.
The road surface has also changed, chunky gravel which can be solidly embedded into the clay or, now the road isn’t being treated with water, the whole lot is loose and hence I’m travelling at two thirds the speed of yesterday.
The road swings somewhat west which helps in the wind department but all in all it’s more of the standard Birdsville Track experience I’d been expecting, yesterday obviously wasn’t typical. Guess I should shut up about that for a while, you get the picture, I’m the one who chose this trajectory.
There’s just no scale to the vistas, the cloudless sky is huge and I’ve finally taken to wearing my sunnies during the middle of the day, the glare from the white road is considerable. The grass is short and as I near Sturt’s Stony Desert, not so much in the way of herbage, anything is ankle height. If Birdsville is 50 m above sea level the creeks I’m crossing now are down around the 20 m mark, it’s not exactly flat just ultra long period undulations, some sandhills to climb, no worries about sand, the road being that chunky gravel and you look out from the top to mirages and hovering trees on the horizon, you really get the feeling this is real desert here, those red or orange sand dunes help, we’re in the lowest rainfall area in Australia, less than an inch falls a year, like 18 mm.
Surprisingly there is water, left over from Wet Season floods up north and even some in dams built for the cattle which turn up here for some Sunday morning exercise being chased by a particularly slow moving bike tourist.